Telling our Story Through the GTA Brand

For over 80 years, Grand Teton Association (GTA) has supported the educational initiatives of its agency partners by contributing 100% of sales profits from its retail locations. In 2019, GTA began working with local marketing and creative agency, Cultivate. These efforts identified an opportunity to increase organization impact by clarifying GTA’s mission and strengthening its organizational brand. GTA firmly believes that when visitors better understand the positive impact their purchase has in support of public lands, they would choose a GTA retail location over other businesses.

Cultivate and GTA together began a large audit of all of GTA’s marketing and communication efforts, as well as the current brand. After much research, a key component that emerged was that most of GTA’s marketing talked about the projects they supported and the partnerships they had. While these stories were important, they were leaving out a key component of how their audience could enter their story, which was their retail stores. Together they set forth a vision that shifted their organizational brand and marketing to optimize the support of public lands through retail operations. Once this shift occurred, it opened up a tremendous amount of growth and success potential by asking their public land visitors to join this effort by shopping at GTA retail locations. With this new awareness, visitors are becoming more inspired to support and shop!

Throughout the past year, marketing, signage, and countless other organizational pieces were updated to reflect this change, just in time for a new busy summer season.